August 1st, 1999: We have arrived!

Here is the first of (hopefully) many reports from Eric and Sue's 4 month trip through Asia:

I can't believe after all the months of planning that we have finally arrived! Our flight turned out to be unbelieveably smooth - it amazes me how easy it is today to travel halfway around the world (OK, almost half). Eric gave me an A- for my flying - I only dove into his lap on two occasions of turbulence which I think
even scared him. It was nice to see as well that they have finally gotten
individual TV screens in the cheap seats - we got to play Hangman and watch Seinfeld the whole way across the Pacific. And to top it off, we hoth got a full nights sleep (I think Eric snoozed for 10 hours!).

Hong Kong is just beautiful. It is unbelieveably hot and humid (88F - I am
sure that sounds rather cool to those of you in the midwest and east right now), but surprisingly it isn't slowing us down. We spent the first day hooking up with our friend Meg who is here studying Cantonese. What luck on our part that our first days in China are spent with someone who is fluent in both Cantonese and
Mandarin! She helped us get our visas for mainland China (we didn't need one to enter Hong Kong) and a room for only $28 a night.

Now John Doyle, I hope you are sitting - we are staying at the Chungking
Mansion. This place is a 16 story building where the first two floors are shops and resturants, and the rest of the floors are "guesthouses" - groups of rooms that are for rent to people who can't afford the normal Hong Kong prices of $100 or more.

John told me a story before I left about how scary the Chungking Mansion is,
with rats in the stairwells and the elevators that are on the verge of breaking. Well, it turns out our friend Meg is staying there, and she had found a really nice guest house with no cockroaches and cool tile floors to help beat the heat. So despite my
expectation that we would s-l-o-w-l-y work into this "roughing it", we have
dived right in. And truthfully,John, it really isn't that bad...

We took the ferry over to Hong Kong island with Meg and ate lunch at this
great old resturant that looked like it was right out of an old Pink Panther movie. The wait staff was all at least 50 years old, and there were even spitoons on the floor! We only got a table because Meg spoke Cantonese, and gourged ourselves on dim sum.

She then left us, and Eric and I decided to walk up to Victoria Peak (we
thought this would be good practice for our trip in Nepal, where we need to climb 500m a day - the same height as Victoria Peak). So we set off, stomachs full of dim sum and the burning mid-day sun and heat at their peak. Of course we didn't bother to take a map, thinking if we walked "up" we would eventually find the way. We ended up instead on an old set of steps that I think were laid there to monitor the drainage down the hill that dead ended well short of the peak. Truth be told, though, we couldn't have made it much further. We have a lot of practicing to do before we get to Nepal...and we didn't even have backpacks on...

So we can't believe we are finally here. Looks like cyber access shouldn't
be too hard, but we haven't gone to the mainland yet. Time will tell!!

Thanks to everyone for your support and help in getting us out the door!
Kiss Lucy for us!

Sue and Eric
ps - PLEASE don't group respond to our e-mails - as funny as you are, I
don't think everyone wants to hear it!!